Colonial visions of "Third World" toilets : a nineteenth-century discourse that haunts contemporary tourism

In 1998, I spent three months in Tunisia studying Arabic and taking a much-needed holiday from my Ph.D. studies. An Australian woman of mixed heritage (including Cherokee Indian), my multilingualism, physical smallness, black hair and eyes, and yellow-toned skin allow me to blend in or at least to defy categorisation, in a range of cultures. As a woman travelling alone in that region, I attracted an inordinate amount of attention but was also, perhaps due to my liminal status as an anomaly, privy to some insightful confessions and revelations from Tunisians and Algerians I met there.